Marisha Pessl’s new literary thriller – arriving seven years after her splashy debut novel, "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" – captures something true about the viral, jumpy, surface-skittering way we live now. In an age of the infinitely reproducible, Pessl strives for innovation through remix rather than originality. Clichés and too-familiar tropes are prized playthings for her, and the more the merrier. Nothing is new in Night Film except for the abandon with which the author piles on references to movies and magazines and websites and other books; yet by mimicking the frantic hypertexture of contemporary life, the novel keeps reminding us just how much has changed.

The narrator of "Night Film" is Scott McGrath, a New York City-based investigative reporter who was sued for defamation in 2006 while probing too closely into the activities of a reclusive, Oscar-winning director named Stanislas Cordova. In the wake of the lawsuit, McGrath’s marriage went kerflooey, his high-flying career tanked, and he’s been left to brood in his Perry Street apartment, alone with his memories and a forlorn movie poster of Alain Delon on his office wall.

Cut to October 2011, with breaking news that Cordova’s beautiful 24-year-old daughter, Ashley, has been found dead in the elevator shaft of an empty Chinatown warehouse. Was it suicide or murder? Was she troubled by inner demons, assaulted by someone she knew, or stalked by strangers? And how involved was her father, the sinister, shadowy Cordova – a grand master of horror flicks, notorious for blurring the line between appearance and reality?

Intrigued, McGrath grabs the opportunity to restore his reputation by pursuing the case. Along the way, he picks up two helpful young sidekicks: a 19-year-old coat-check girl named Nora and Hopper, a small-time drug dealer with a heart of gold and a vague personal history that just might have included an association with Ashley Cordova.